Nocturne.

Every stroke of genius
Belies a gentle simplicity
And every tender tracing
Draws from a basic melody
And even in such clockwork discord
I find peace between the lines


Silk spiders on ivory
Bound in shifting silver
Make it rain

Poison the waterhole.

Exquisitely destructive
In the wake of my perfection
That is not your bent

Do you live in the forest?
Are you trapped in the past?
Do the boughs of the forest bend for you?

They do not bend for you
The forest is mine
Witch

And I'd have you know I cauterise
The forest's paralytic spread

.

One foot in the grave
And the other in your bed
One hand is hammering the nails in my coffin
And the other is resting right under your head

A Villanelle.

Through valley, savannah, the mud and the snow
From clifftop we howl to the midnight air
Look just how far we have managed to go

To the dead wind's of the marsh, the great cold night's tow
Inside of the swamps, and wherever we dare
Through valley, savannah, the mud and the snow

The old sleeping giants force our path low
To the ground we had marched through all eldritch lairs
Look just how far we have managed to go

When tragedy struck, and our progress made slow
By the dread inward rage, at our own flesh we tear
Through valley, savannah, the mud and the snow

Scooped up by the water, and the tide swells and grows
We are made clean in the cool, the sea, green and fair
Look just how far we have managed to go

On mountain we scream and let our demons know
Saints all and sinners, with theatrical flair
Through valley, savannah, the mud and the snow
Look just how far we have managed to go

Comport yourselves.

As our worry wanes
Our idiosyncratic
Temperamental and
All too eccentric
Proclivities
Grow

When the instance comes
The elevation of
And instinctual flight from
The beast within
The static
Slows

Is that any way to behave?

The Happy Road.

Why, yes, I have been reading Dr. Seuss.

We're all just a little afraid of ennui
It's a big scary world, so naturally
We sometimes become a bit scared, but don't be
Even though it might be hard to fight, this ennui

One day you may slump down into a ditch
A dip in the highway, no ride there to hitch
You'll be unable to scratch that ongoing itch
Scratched by your movement, blocked by this ditch

Normally you'd run at your neck-breaking speed
That's what life's about! No matter the deed
Unflinching, unstopping, no goal but "Proceed!"
It's key for our happiness, this wind-matching speed

But down in the ditch there's nowhere to run
There's nothing to do, there's not any fun
So sometimes you sit, and nothing get's done
What you'd rather be just going out for a run

But I have a solution to this impasse, this grate
The only way out of the ditch is "Create!"
A bridge or a ladder or something to sate
Your escapee needs, you need something great

And sometimes it's hard to create anything
You can't dance, you can't write, you can't build, laugh, or sing
And from this maker's struggle, the most marvelous thing
We find progress in there, yes, progress! Of all things

There are all manner of ditches and forks in the road
And the choice now is yours, to decide where you go
Don't forget to create for those ditches are low
And you'll find yourself on a new happy road

Gentlemen.

I am expert,
So they say,
At being the stranger yet finding a way


And worming in.
I've never relinquished
And I delight in easy wins.


And you, you, you,
Mein Gott, Mon Dieu,
Are winning,


But, phew,
What a place to stop.
Enunciate


Your words,
Please,
The blinds


On the windows of your mind
Are tattered,
Bruised and battered


By the times.
They keep on spinning, and I
Can fly


On wings,
A cape,
And children's things.


I may be a bit of a child
And the unwashed leper too.
Oh, you


Exhale like the lungs
Of the no longer broken,
But are you still broken in two?


You, du, Sie,
Tu,
En parlez-vous?


Lord knows I do.

The House of God.

The walls of the house of God
Are made
Of stone that's cold
And wood that's old
The walls of the house of God
Can speak
An ancient tongue
That still seems young
The walls of the house of God
Don't sing
No, not for you
No, not for you
The walls of the house of God
Are made
Of skulls and ribs
And ash and fibs
Of whiskey, wine
That once was mine
Of crying babes
And wolves from caves
The walls of the house of God
Are made
Of stone that's cold
And wood that's old

The walls of the house of God
Are crumbling down
To let the light of God
In once again
So we may sing
Of love and beauty
And of sin
The walls of the house of God
Are dead
For all the phoenixes here bred
Will sing to the happy day
Of death
The walls of the house of God
Are gone

The door of the house of God
Is cracked
Just like his crown
It's broken down
The door of the house of God
Fell like
The euthanized
In clouds of flies
The needle made the final call
For the final rejoice of them all
With a breath of air
Of wind we broke
The door of the house of God
The door of the house of God
Leads somewhere
That we'd never been
Content to wile away the days
Inside the house of God

The floor of the house of God
Is less
Complex than all the other parts
It's made of fire
Of God's ire
So we could not go walk about
Forced to sit still
In the house of God

The roof of the house of God
Composed
Of clouds and lightning
Swift-sword foes
The roof of the house of God
Was used
To keep us in
To contain sin
I may have built it at some point
I welded in the nuts and joints
So only I knew how to break
The roof
The floor
The walls
The door
The entire house of God

But I was never a man of God
No matter what the weather
I was never a man of God
And we broke his house together

An Almost Song.

The sky fell onto me
Onto my head
The night
Becomes my casket
And I am always in the wind


Je cherchais le Dieu

Je cherchais un destin
Je cherchais l'indéfinissable

Si loin de mon chemin

Par hasard, je suis tombé

Dan un trou à l'enfer, euh

Je ne sais plus m'en enfuir

Et je n'y trouve que

Des mots que je ne dis pas

Des lettres jamais lus

Je t'assure que

Tu n'as jamais rencontré

Un coeur plus confus

Que le mien

Mais je cherche désespérément

Toujours le tien

And maybe this will become a song.

A Parsec.

Let me just sort this out in words before I write anything. I won't be able to say anything if I'm thinking about astronomy:

In a right-angled triangle, with points E (the Earth), S (the sun), and D (a hypothetical astronomical body), we find the following characeristics:

• the right angle is ESD,
• the distance ES is 1AU,
• and the angle EDS is 1" (1 arcsecond).

In this hypothetical astronomical arrangement, the length SD is considered a parsec, approximately 3.085 x 10^16 metres.

Gee, thanks for fixating yourself on that, brain.

Actually, something just occurred to me. Today's topic of discussion is remarkably relevant to the aforementioned. Wheels in wheels. Fuck you, brain.

Something that's been on my mind a lot in recent weeks, on and off for a couple of months actually, is the subject of spirituality. Stop reading here if you're horrified by the prospect of spiritual musings from a teenager. Lord knows I would be.

I was talking to someone about it, and much to my surprise, he expressed that he considered himself a heavily spiritual person. I'm not one to judge- no, let me rephrase, I'm not one to care what anyone considers themselves, unless they consider themselves the personified bane of my material existence and actively take to pelting stones at me from the first floor of the food court, but the reason I found it surprising in the first place was based on an anti-adolescent prejudice. At a more basic level, all religions/philosophies are exponents of human spirituality, but the general modern zeitgeist concerning spirituality encompasses all of "anything that isn't Christianity", an ideal I personally find infuriating.

So at first, I just assumed he meant he invested himself in a bastard mixture of Buddhism, Hinduism, Kabbalah, and non-Theistic Satanism, a combination which would completely undermine the core philosophies of the individual faiths. Any combination of the faiths would render the individual parts moot, excepting to people who have an incredibly detailed and in-depth understanding of each, so detailed that he/she could pick and choose aspects of each without losing their original significance. So that idea makes me mad, in short. But this isn't about what makes me mad, that's a completely different type of post.

Wait, I need to be listening to Dead Can Dance for this whole discussion to not feel stupid... there we go.

It occurred to me, rather, I reasoned it myself, by contextual details (which escape me, unfortunately) and the significance of the expression of spirituality, that what he meant was something entirely different. What he meant, when he defined himself as a spiritual person, is something like "spirituality is an undefinable, intuitive sense that governs subconscious emotions". So basically 'what your heart tells you', which isn't too bad a definition. He believed in gut feelings, in intuition and subconscious perception. Or maybe he didn't and I just made all of this up. I like it anyway, and it's positively coloured the way I interact with him. What's important is that he reacted to my surprise with inquisition and asked me what I defined as spirituality, and I said, essentially: "everyone can make up their own damn mind about it", and he agreed and it was a nice moment for everyone involved.

Whoa, Ollie, don't go speeding towards the point, you'll disorient yourself.

And since that evening several months ago, I've been thinking in brief spurts about what it means to be spiritual person, and what spirituality is. Because I really don't know, and for some reason I feel like it's an important thing for me to do. It occurred to me on a very long walk yesterday. I figured it out, clever me. Sorry, kudos me. You know what I'm talkin' about.

So, basically, the all-important conclusion that I came to, to which I came while listening to the very same Dead Can Dance song I'm listening to now (Song of the Stars, if you care to know) (actually, I wonder if the song has anything to do with it OH WAIT STARS, bear with me), is that spiritual practice is a way of orienting yourself in a more universal sense. It's a way of placing yourself in the world, in the universe, in whatever. In my eyes, to be spiritual person is to understand where you stand in relation to everyone else. When I say the world and the universe I don't mean the physical entities, because that can be defined perfectly and mathematically... except for the universe one. What I mean is the collective of human consciousness, thought, and interaction.

And that's why the parsec thing is relevant! Because by definition, a parsec is about a placement within space. You see? I'm not mad, just obscure and ridiculous!

I thought quite a bit about it, and it all seems to make sense. All religions seem to be about defining oneself, finding a place. You use these extant philosophies; Abrahamic religion, Eastern philosophy, modern spiritual practice, to, or so it all seems to me, understand your place within a psycho-social matrix, or whatever other stupid phrase you can come up with to describe the collection of human existence. Most modern popular religions are about collectivism: they rely on the base philosophy that humans are generally social creatures, no, they are social creatures by necessity, and most of the theories they espouse focus on that. You see a lot of religious texts talking about actions regarding other humans. Thou shalt not be an utter fucknuckle etc etc etc. These religions find a place for you, a place long established. And that's fine too. The people that ascribe modern life to these religions are spiritual people too, they understand where they stand.

I'll discuss further by way of the book I'm reading, Perdido Street Station. It's pretty great new-fantasy, 'weird fiction' I think is the generally accepted term. Anyway, one of the fictional sentient races within the world in which the book is set, Bas-Lag, is the (subtly-named) garuda: a race of bird people from the northern deserts. Their entire culture is about maximizing choice for the individual, it's the ultimate form of socialism. Their entire penal code is based on the idea of choice-theft. You can rob someone of the right to choose their own fate, and that constitutes a crime. A lot of the forms of choice-theft are just analogies for what we interpret as criminal acts. It's really fucking confusing, if I'm honest, but that's not relevant. What's important is that it's discussed that the idea of choice-theft points to a very interesting collective psychology, that every individual in traditional garuda society is constantly conscious of their own choices, but also completely aware of the social matrix in which they live. They have to be, their entire society is founded on being aware of it. To me, that constitutes exactly what I define as spirituality, an individual aware of its placement in a manner of respects, except in this case that philosophy has been codified into a form of tribal law.

And that's the kind of internal debate I have with myself on a daily basis. It very rarely verbalises. That feels really good to see in proper words. I hope that anyone reading this understands what the fuck I'm on about. I'm not even sure if I do.

Northern Air.

In that northern air
In the mountain air
I'll find you there

I want to open up the window
And feel the northern air
And dive in crystal lakes
And wonder how I ended up here
On the other side of the world

I want strangers to be strangers
Not brothers in disguise
I want to be afraid
And alight with possibility

I want to open up the world
And feel the northern air
But most of all
I'd like to find you there

An Education.

I have the dulcet tones of banjo strings reverberating through my head.

Fortunately, I happen to own a banjo.

This bodes ill.

(Twelve-bar blues, A)

Sitting in that great big hall

Worrying my poor head off

Fretting over facts, quotes and citations

What the Hell am I doing here?

I've not a lot of time for this

For papers, grades and questions, miss

I haven't got the patience for annotations

What the Hell am I doing here?

Oh, that's right

Getting an education

They told me, boy, you've got to work

If you want to make it big

Learn to wall your head in concentration

What the Hell are you talking about?

Make no mistake about it, son

You'll end up one of those hopeless bums

If you don't learn to read the complications

What the Hell are you talking about?

We're talking about

Getting an education

So I took the train down to the west

I thought, those folks, now, they know best

I felt a sense of great anticipation

I wonder what it's all really about

I walked a mile in rain and sleet

To that great big university

My spirits underwent an elevation

I wonder what it's all really about

I thought

I'm gonna get an education

Small wonder now I soon found out

What this place was all about

This place of men and their dissertations

I found out what it was really all about

They put me in a great big hall

Where I worried my poor head off

Two hours of academic subjugation

I found out what it was really all about

And now

I'm getting an education

But on the way I met a man

A resident of this learning land

Who offered me some spirits and libations

I still don't know what that was all about

He told me 'bout all the good fun

About drinking past the setting sun

It's not so bad this place of ostentation

He told me what it was all about

This place

This place of education

During the tests and lectures here

It seems to me, despite my fears

I'd made a downright huge miscalculation

I know what it's all really about

The learning's half the fun, you know

No matter to what place you go

I set myself in my determination

Now that I know, what it's really all about

This learning infestation

Of mild intoxication

This place of often post-noon hibernation

This place of personalisation

Of dreams and revelations

Of formation, love, and frequent fornication

This place

This place of education

.

I love you.

And when they come to take you
Which we know they will
I will be the name in hasty madman's scrawl
Written in your scarlet blood
On the asylum walls
You always were a theist, dear
You always were a fool

Maybe not your eyes
But I'll cut your heart on horns
Oh
Maybe I'm the fool

A Cadaver Has Many Uses.

It has been so long since I've written anything close to narrative. It feels good. I don't know where all this came from, but I think it's kind of nice.

Melanie was sleeping in a shack, covered in red leaves. One of them, oak, lightly browned, flickered back and forth across her nose. The stalk had gotten stuck in her mouth during a bout of sleep-talk and now it lightly buffeted her face every time the wind picked up enough to penetrate the wet wood walls. She would never admit it, but the events of the last week had impacted her more than she, or anyone for that matter, had expected. Least of all Ged. In her weaker moments, she doubted whether Ged was the right person to ask for help when it came to these sorts of things. She had no idea anyone with such a preposterous and flamboyant personality was so well versed in thaumaturgy of any form, least of all something so repugnant and generally reviled. But along with being a notorious fop, he was well-known for being damnably efficient and ruthless when it came to business matters.

The amiable poet-artiste traipsed over to the tiny hovel from his own splendorous abode with all the grace of one who makes a living twirling through high society like a dreidel. His contemporaries always said that one day he'd run out of balance and fall through the floor, and no amount of fashionable proclivities and pomposity would save him. The care with which he threw open the door was lacking considering Melanie's unconscious state. The gust of wind threw his wool scarf and overcoat into a dramatic shuffle, making his entrance all the more imposing, had anyone been watching. 

"Come now, dear, wakey-wakey, rise and shine, all that. You can't sleep your entire life away, er, death, rather." He dusted off his hands, and looked around. "My word, I can't imagine how you'd manage a nice night's rest in this kind of place, my word, indeed. I feel myself becoming a junkie just by looking at the walls, oh, fetch me a syringe would you, dear?" He cackled.

Melanie awoke to his rambling, but she didn't want to betray the fact. She had long since decided that the last thing Ged needed was someone to indulge his linguistic affects. Ged straightened himself up, putting on a frank and more serious air.

"I'd give it approximately another week before the need for sleep fades away entirely. Lucky you," his speech quickened back to it's normal frenetic pace, "but don't think that means you can sleep the next few days away in this... abysmal place. You've got people to meet, contacts to make, old ties to cut and new ones to forge. It's a whole new world of running the line that separates you from us poor living folk, a daring balancing act, perched on the edge of unlife she makes a daring escape from the brutish-"

"Alright! Shut up! For God's sake, I'll get up and go to your stupid party. Fuck." Melanie rose to her feet swiftly, much to Ged's surprise. The retrospective knowledge that Melanie had been listening the whole time and had not answered unnerved him. Newly changed were supposed to be less willful. "I asked you to make the change, do the hocus-pocus, you're not obliged to introduce me into one of your stupid high society whore circles, bloody hell." She rubbed her stomach instinctively. One of her fingers accidentally slipped into the relatively recent stab wound in her gut.

Ged's eyes narrowed as he leaned in to inspect the bloody gorge in the soft white flesh. His voice dropped a few tones to a smoky lull, trying to seem bored by the whole ordeal of cadavers. Which, of course, he was. "Ah, yes, I should probably do something about that nasty business." Wind rushed in from behind Ged's navy overcoat as his eyes went black. Melanie winced to feel the rotting and necrotic flesh slowly stitch itself back together. She looked down to observe the process, and promptly cursed the fact that she was now physically unable to vomit.

She shot a glare at Ged, who now stood looking rather smug in the doorway, the black draining from his eyes. He smiled. "Just because that body you've pilfered is dead doesn't mean it can't look lovely. You'll need to for the party, after all."

"I didn't know you could do that," she was incredulous and caustic, "healing's not your bit, is it?"

"Darling, you're a walking corpse, I can do anything with those. And frequently do." He giggled and turned to leave. "Now come along, people are going to wonder what happened to lovely little Beatrice. That was her name, just by the way. She was quite charming, put up quite the fight, which is why I had to resort to methods so barbaric as..." he gestured in the direction of the former wound and sighed in mock irritation. "That."

A gasp escaped Melanie's cold lips; bodily functions ceased after death, but the muscles in her diaphragm were still operational. "Godfuck! Ged! I thought you were going to get something from the underground, not source it yourself! Fuck! What if someone comes looking for the little bitch? Putting an innocent girl's fucking mind into a corpse is bad enough, but into a fresh murder victim? Holy godfucking hell, Ged!" She again was livid to find she couldn't vomit in disgust. She collapsed onto the ground in sudden horror, racked by uncontrollable shakes, cursing into the air, and at Ged, repeatedly.

A hand placed itself on Melanie's shivering head, gently fingering the deep red hair that now belonged to her. Ged, the flimsy perfumed wordsmith now loomed over her like the tallest redwood in the forest. His white hair matched the colour of the rising moon glimpsed through the shoddy carpentry of the roof. He looked almost benevolent with the stars at his back. The hand impatiently tightened around a few locks of the matted red cloth, which Ged later assured her would look wonderful after a brush, and pulled the horrified Melanie up to meet his emptily smiling face. If she was stupid enough to give him the satisfaction she'd have hidden her face and whimpered in acquiescence.

"My, my, my. And here I was thinking you might be grateful to the man who facilitated your escape from that hideous hunk of flesh you used to call home. Melanie. Mel. Beatrice, even," he cooed patronisingly, "we're going to go to a party. This girl I've got you is quite high up I'll have you know, someone will come looking for her. There's no doubt about that. But rest assured, my sweet little angel," Ged poked a finger into the site of the wound he had so graciously healed, Melanie almost felt as if it were still there, "in such a case, I'll be the one on the block. So let's go to this delightful little gathering, and let everyone know about Beatrice's great ambition to travel the world and never see any one of her beloved upper class friends again." He dropped her. Melanie fell to the floor like a sack of severed heads. "And then you'll be free to do whatever it is you want with that lovely new body of yours."

With a deep, meditative inhalation, the towering, unwavering Ged was replaced by the bouncy bubble of his usual public face. "Sorry about that. But, someone has to pick up the slack, and I know you've had such an awfully hard time adjusting, it boggles the mind, it really does." Melanie was picking herself up. "You'll find you won't bruise. Your heart shouldn't even beat if I've done my job properly, and I always do," he winked knowingly and grinned, "come along then, let's get you dressed and ready to mingle!" Without another thought he flounced out the door, sashaying into the early hours of the night.

Post change, Melanie was in no state to be disagreeing with such a forceful suggestion. She limply pulled herself together. The weight of the last few days was finally catching up with her, and despite all her defiance, she couldn't go up against someone like Ged. Not now, not ever as far as she was aware. She just needed to wait it out until she was free to do what she would. Let Ged have his fun, she did owe him that much.

She stumbled out the door to tail her benefactor and apparent keeper. Of all the functions of the living she was now cut away from, Melanie wished most that she could cry.

I Am Not For Sale.

Hooray, we're back to songwriting.

4/4

fig1.

||: Am | - | C| G |

C | G - G/F# - | E | G :||

Salvation is my right
But perdition is my fate
I am not for sale

The cries of a thousand men
Are like milk and honey
But I am not for sale

fig.2
C | G | C | G |
Am | - | - | - | x2

I am not for sale
Not even if Heaven's on the cards
I won't play your game
Your mighty chessboard nestled in the stars

fig1.

Divine dealings in mortal flesh
Run away, lest
You find yourself up for sale

You're are not an angel
You're a sinner with raven wings
And I am not for sale

fig3.
Dm  | G | C | - |

And do you think
That I'm easily manipulated?
Do you think
A little book
Can change my mind?
What do you use
All those mortal spirits for?
That you're so determined
To put me up for sale and act like that I don't

fig4.
Am | E/G | C | G | x2
mind-

fig1.

Do you really want me?
I'm not worth a lot
Hardly worth a sale

fig2.

I am not for sale
Not even if Heaven's on the cards
I won't play your game
Your mighty chessboard nestled in the stars
A life of cowardice and light
Isn't worth an eternity of bliss
So, I am not for sale

Ennui.

"Constraints on your time will be regarded as a personal attack."

I never thought I'd find a way to describe that.

The Mercy of the Sun.

You get knocked over by
The sun, wielding mercy in his
Vain and glorious arms
They are made of yew and hazel
They are made of God's love
The sun is made of something more than
Earthly wishes and
The great unwashed pleadings
Of the hatred of the crowd

Luciform, the sun
Cannot
Extend his fragile cage
Of bone
And salt
Beyond a modicum of mercy

Yet despite
That
We beg he relinquish
That great wooden stake
To our Dracula

Are we forever
doomed
My friends
To vanish from sight
And crumble to dust
In what is apparently mercy?

The mercy of
The sun

The Dead.

The dead
The dead all dressed in red
In dermal metal made of lead
Made for the elves a stony bed
There to join the dead
The dead

The slaves
The slaves holed in their caves
With rifles and their great war staves
Rise in tremors and shock-waves
The God's almighty slaves
The slaves

The war
The war since times of yore
Between men and gods and carnivores
Raging on forevermore
The never-ending war
The war

The fight
The fight raged in the night
And to the dying of the light
Flee to your ships and to spaceflight
From the ancient fight
The fight

The dead
The dead all soaked in red
In dermal metal made of lead
Fight for their patron gods a-bed
They are the quiet dead
The dead

Through Malkav's Eye.

One are all and all are one
Our house will view the thousand suns
Rising through the eyes of Gott
Rising through the eyes of Gott
One are all and all are dead
And in our minds we see him red
All are one in Malkav's eyes
All are one through Malkav's eye
I must pass back through Malkav's eye

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

And those are the words that went through Eckhardt's head when he lost all physical and psychological self-control.


BANG.

Freshwater.

I took a wrong turn at the Mississippi delta
And I broke into a family of alligator-men
Grinning like madmen
Down in their hovels
A voodoo goddess took my soul
Wrenched out of my skin
By her divine whim
On the mighty Mississippi

I took a wrong turn at the Nile delta
And I became bisected
One hand scarred and battered
The other bound in silver
Like jackals I tore at the flesh of the dying world
And the pieces of myself spread themselves about
Up and down the noble Nile

I took a wrong turn around Rome on the Tiber
And hero-like I turned to stone
Was flung into the tide
For my treason and sin
One day I'll join the holy men
And the devils and saints all dressed in red
Here floating down to the sea
On the turbulent Tiber

I am trapped here on the Indus river
Each of my thousand arms is caught
On a corpse
The debris, troubles being what they are
The detritus of war and famine and plague
And my bull horns and serenity avail me nothing
I'm floating upstream of the Indus
To the mighty Himalayas
To climb the crags with my thousand arms

The Infinity.

When all the world is still
The air turns to wet cement
Silence stomps all through the grey
And footprints indent a muddy memory
In the ash

The infinity continues
Stretching beyond my eyes and mind
The infinity is crushing me
But it's alright, it's alright
I don't mind